


Prizrak

by BuckyIsMySpiritAnimal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:29:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3805339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuckyIsMySpiritAnimal/pseuds/BuckyIsMySpiritAnimal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His job is to remember their screams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prizrak

**Author's Note:**

> This whole thing is suicidal ideation. Please don't read if that's triggering for you. First thing I've posted - written after a particularly bad night of nightmares, so a bit of an odd style.

Hollywood seems to think that PTSD likes to shake you from a dead sleep. For Bucky, it's always been quiet. Invasive. Slipping in the dark spaces of his brain. Silently. Efficiently. Just like him. Sets up a sniper shot in the night, and vanishes back into the shadows. 

He likes to think this honors them somehow. The echoes of screaming children, tendrils of cordite slipping in his sense memory. The ghosts are happy that someone remembers them. Their killer keeps them alive. 

Looking at Steve, burrowed into his pillow, somehow breathing and pretty, with his flip of hair pressed against his face, Bucky remembers the three recoils from when he shot a president. He was an important man, a handsome man, a broad jaw and Irish hair, just like Steve. 

Bucky closes his eyes, inhales, calculates the windage and elevation, and takes his target, each shot with an exhale, keeping the muzzle steady, efficient. Somewhere in time, women are screaming, and Bucky still has that ghost in his head.

Steve sleeps quietly. His ghosts are only voices, distant, like crossed lines on a call. He can sleep through them now, except when it's Bucky, screaming and falling. 

Bucky is still screaming and falling. He misses his mask. He slips out of the bed, and trembles on the couch, listening to their voices, lining up his kills. He can't forget them. He won't forget them. 

He closes his eyes in the dark, inhales, and chokes back a sob. Someday soon, he'll make sure that others can honor his ghosts for him. He'd like to make a final mission report, record it for posterity, and then he can finally stop falling. 

Like every night, he rests the cool muzzle of a pistol against his temple, and lets his pulse move against it as he swallows. He'll be his last mission. It'll hurt Steve, but Bucky won't be falling anymore. His ghosts will be able to rest. Steve will forget. 

He tells these lies to the gun.  
He tells it to the ghosts. 

This is his lullaby. 

He crawls back into bed behind Steve, and smiles, dreaming now of the day he is decommissioned, the day he isn't a tool to be used, a boogeyman in the shadows, the day he gets to think of himself and only himself. 

Just him and his Glock and quiet. The blood will clean up, and the ghosts will settle, and Steve'll find someone who isn't broken. 

He falls back to sleep. No screaming in his head. He has a mission now.


End file.
